[drats_users] "statistics"

[Nate Duehr]

Dan,

Two things:

During testing on Sunday night, we noticed that the sending station 
(using Windows 0.2.6) in the "sessions" tab was always seeing 
"negotiating 0%") for their "statistics" until a entire long 
transmission (pipeline - we were set to 4 on both ends I think) was 
completed, then the percentage of file transfered would jump to a large 
number (depending on file size), say ... 54% or something.  Then one 
more long transmission and it would say "closed".

Couple of thoughts here.  At the end of a transfer (pipelined or not), 
could D-RATS give some feedback to the user as to how many packets the 
file was, how many it had to re-try, etc?

Also, I guess I'm wondering if that status thingy could update a little 
"smarter" during the transmissions -- but I kinda understand why you 
can't... it's sending and the software is just waiting on it.  Maybe it 
could say "sending 4/35 packets, waiting for confirmation" or something?

Some people were a little confused that it always said: "negotiating" 
and stayed at 0% for so long during the initial sending of packets.

Finally, the "closed" thing at the end was a bit ambiguous... does 
"closed" mean "successful" or does it mean just "closed".  (Closed to me 
tends to make me think the session got "closed" before it really completed.)

None of the above are complaints, just some stumbling blocks for "ease 
of use" for us dummies watching the screen and trying to "see" what's 
going on.

I have some other questions about the Form transfer of ICS files... but 
we'll do some more testing on that before I ask something REALLY dumb.  :-)

Final question: I know D-RATS usually filters out messages and traffic 
not directed at a particular station.  It may already have this feature 
but I missed it... is there a way to see "raw" data from the serial 
port?  I saw the "treat plain text as messages" checkbox, or something 
like that, but I'm thinking more along the lines of... I just fired up 
the rig and the laptop, and I see that there's two other people already 
engaged in a data transfer... is there some way D-RATS could tell me 
(maybe in the session tab) that it's X and Y callsigns sending D-RATS 
data ... kinda a "channel monitor" type of thing that would "prove" my 
station is working on receive, since I can "see" them sending stuff back 
and forth?  (And maybe if it "sees" the initial conversation, it could 
show the filename they're transferring, etc?)

Okay... those are just thoughts for user interface "stuff".  None of the 
above is super-important.

Nate WY0X